Want To Learn Hypnotherapy?

Well you're in the right place...

If you have no idea about hypnotherapy but you want to learn, as with most things it's a good idea to read up on the subject a little before you sign up and commit to a full hypnotherapy training course...

My book The Beginner's Guide to Hypnotherapy is the perfect introduction for anyone wanting to become a hypnotherapist. From the basic principles of hypnotherapy through to more advanced techniques, this book is the ideal starting point for anyone thinking about learning how to do hypnotherapy, whether as a well-paid career, or even just as a hobby...

So, what about Hypnotherapy Training Courses?

Hypnotherapy training courses are definitely the best option for anybody who is serious about learning to become a confident, effective hypnotherapist. Obviously, reading hypnotherapy books is a good start, but to really get the hang of it (as with most things), it's a lot better if you learn whilst actually physically doing it!

If you've already decided that you want to learn hypnotherapy with Rory Z and The Hypnotherapy Training Company in London, then all you need to do is click the button below to take a look at our upcoming hypnotherapy course dates. If you're still undecided, however, keep reading for some really useful tips about how to pick the very best hypnotherapy training company...

Tips On How to Pick A Hypnotherapy Trainer

There are a whole bunch of different hypnotherapy trainers and companies out there that want you to train with them, but as with most unregulated training (yes, hypnotherapy isn't regulated in the UK), a lot of these so-called "hypnotherapy trainers" aren't actually much good... In fact, some of them are downright bloody awful!

So there are a lot of things for you, the aspiring student, to consider when you're looking to sign up for top quality hypnotherapy training. Here are some really good tips to for you to keep in mind when you're booking your hypnotherapy course...

the first course you see probably isn't the best...

As a new student of hypnotherapy, you must shop around. Shopping around means not signing up to the very first course that you stumble upon. The most common way for us to find a hypnotherapy course would be... Google!

Generally the "organic" entries featured at the top of Google (or on the first page), are those that have been around for a while, or those that have plenty of referring links (because if other people/organisations link back to a page, it generally means it's a trustworthy page or a fairly decent/long-standing company).

I'm betting you wouldn't go to page 10 of Google to find a local plumber, would you? Well you could be doing just that when you choose one of the (un-organic) entries at the top of the Google search! Lots of companies pay to be at the top of Google because they can't get there naturally (alarm bells are ringing), so I always advise people to beware the ads at the top of Google searches. If you see a little box that says "Ad" next to a Google entry, know that someone has had to pay to put their business in front of you!

Another way to find courses would be to check out hypnotherapy related forums on the internet, there are quite a few, and there are even a whole bunch of hypnosis groups on Facebook, and people are only too willing to share their own learning experiences with you... if you ask nicely.

Anyway, once you've done a little research and found some courses, you can then compare the differences. The main differences being: Cost, Course Duration (including home study hours), Qualifications Awarded and Syllabus - That last one is important, because you need to find out what you're actually going to learn (in detail) otherwise, there's not much point doing the comparison!

There's A Time & Place for "Cheap"

Unfortunately, there are lots and lots of people out there trying to make a "quick buck" teaching hypnotherapy, but if they're not actually any good at teaching it, they will get bad reviews and no referrals (hopefully). So how then do they fill up their sub-standard courses? Well, they usually accomplish this by drastically undercutting those trainers & companies that do actually teach hypnotherapy properly and effectively. So you might want to take that "half-price diploma" with a pinch of salt...

Yes, saving money is great, and something that's always worth considering. By all means go ahead and buy the value baked beans instead of Heinz, but when it comes down to hypnotherapy training, you generally do get what you pay for, and if you pay peanuts, your trainer will probably be a monkey!

(On the flip-side, just because something is super expensive doesn't necessarily make it good either...)

Always Check The Reviews & Testimonials

People will usually tell you exactly what they think of a product or service without much prompting. This is fine when you're buying something from Amazon where companies cannot delete their negative reviews, but when you're looking on a company's own website, it might not be so straight forward. You must remember, the company will usually be in charge of their own website, and therefore they will be able to feature (or not feature) anything they want... So if they get negative reviews, they probably won't put them up on their website.

Unless you're able to find reviews on websites independent of the company itself (like Tripadvisor, but for courses), you should focus on taking a closer look at the reviews and testimonials that these hypnotherapy trainers have featured on their own websites...

Generally student testimonials will be in two formats, text or video. Obviously, video is great, because you get to see that it's a real person leaving the review, just like this review of the HypnoTC Hypnotherapy Certificate course:

If, however, all the reviews on a site are text-based, a disreputable hypnotherapy trainer could easily forge a whole bunch of fake student reviews. Yes, it can (and does) happen, but you can often tell. If you're worried about fake reviews, a couple of things to look out for would be; all of the reviews being written in exactly the same way (i.e. using very similar words/language on every review)... If you type a "reviewers" name into Google, and it comes up blank, (most people exist on Google these days)... Or if the reviews have no names included at all (or just first names)...

Some hypnotherapy training websites (including our own) post student pictures/names/jobs alongside their reviews, so that you can see that the reviews given are genuine, and if you were to Google the reviewers, you'd probably be able to find them.

Oh, and needless to say, if you come across a company that has no reviews, get out of there, quick!

Feel free to take a look at our full hypnotherapy training testimonials, just to get an idea:

Don't Waste Money On "Intensive Courses"

Although the idea of getting your hypnotherapy qualification ASAP might sound great, intensive courses for something as comprehensive as hypnotherapy just don't work! There are hundreds (maybe thousands) of people out there offering an "intensive hypnotherapy certificate / diploma / qualification", most of which consist of as little as 4 to 6 days "intensive training".

Do you really believe that you could fully learn to do hypnotherapy in less than a week, when some of the worlds best hypnotherapists have trained continuously for years to get to their level?

If you wanted to learn to be a surgeon, the last thing that you'd want to do would be to take a 1 week intensive surgeon course, offered by a trainer whose qualifications you couldn't verify... It wouldn't set you up to be a good surgeon, and anyone who wanted to check out your credentials before letting you work at their hospital, would probably be dissuaded...

If you want to learn to do a new skill, whatever it might be, you must do your research. You should want to find the very best training you can possibly afford... You should allow yourself to treat yourself to your very best learning experience, because if it's something you're truly passionate about, you owe it to yourself. You owe yourself the absolute best opportunity to achieve all that you know you are capable of, in the most effective environment possible. You owe yourself the very best hypnotherapy training!

Another thing to remember is that hypnotherapy clients are not always "open-and-close" cases, yet the people running intensive training courses will often try and lead you to believe that they are, or that "one-size-fits-all"... (it doesn't).

It's also proven that the majority of information you hear on an intensive course, you will forget. It's like watching a week-long movie... Are you going to remember every important scene from that movie? I highly doubt it, unless you're Rain Man!

Content is King

There's been a huge buzz about "content free" hypnotherapy training recently. If you've been considering a course offering these methods, let me stop you right there and burst your bubble, because although content free hypnotherapy can work sometimes, the results often only tend to be short-term.

A friend of mine was on a training course to learn some content free techniques, and the trainer told a story about how a woman's life-long phobia of leaving the house was fixed in just one session, without even knowing anything about the problem. This woman did leave her house, she even went to the shops, but a couple of weeks later, she was back at home, and back to her old ways (and probably worse than before, if I had to make an educated guess).

Content free solutions will often mask a problem, instead of getting to the root of the problem, and digging it out.

The way we (and other effective hypnotherapy trainers) teach, is "solution focused" - i.e. focusing on creating a bespoke solution to each particular client's problem(s), using various different approaches. Behavioural changes, metaphors for change, direct suggestions, analytical approaches, future pacing, visualisations, regressing clients back to traumatic events to effectively deal with the issue... Those are just some of the things you should be learning as a hypnotherapist.

The content free crowd teach techniques such as: "Imagine your problem, imagine it as a shape, give it a colour... Now change that shape, and change the colour of it. Now integrate that new shape back inside, and you're fixed."

Now honestly, that ain't gonna do many people much good at all, and if you're paying someone a chunk of money to teach you about hypnotherapy and you learn to talk about shapes and colours, well, you might be better off finding a decent pre-school (it'll be much cheaper, and probably equally as effective).

Note: Yes, that is a real content-free technique that people are paid to teach. If you need to take a course to learn how to do that, hypnotherapy probably ain't the career for you...

Keep It Real

Online training is great if you want to learn how to do Facebook Marketing, or a business management course, or learn some other theoretical-type subject, but if you want to learn something practical, you're going to need to actually practice it. You wouldn't do an online practical driving test! So if you want to learn to be a hypnotherapist, you're gonna need to practice doing hypnotherapy on people, and you're gonna need feedback from the person who is teaching the class, to make sure you're doing it right.

When I personally started out in the hypnosis world, I took an online NLP "diploma" course... To pass this online diploma, you'd have the difficult task of reading an NLP book (provided), and re-wording sections of the book as answers on your exam paper. That was it. The people running the course didn't give a flying fart whether I actually knew NLP by the end of the "course" (I didn't). Nobody cared whether I could actually do the techniques from the book (I couldn't). But I passed anyway, and I got a certificate to say I knew all about something that in fact I absolutely sucked at.

I did eventually learn NLP, but it took months to learn and years to perfect, not just a few hours/days. It took research, experimentation, support and dedication, not an online "exam". So basically:

Don't do an online hypnotherapy course.

They usually suck.

Seriously.

Don't be blinded by certificates...

All too often, bad hypnotherapy trainers will trick people into doing a terrible course by offering a bunch of certificates upon completion, offering something like:

"Sign up and receive your hypnotherapy diploma, and we'll give you an additional clinical hypnotherapy certificate, an NLP diploma and we'll even throw in a Life Coaching certificate too, all for just £199!"

Unfortunately however, those certificates are usually absolutely meaningless and a waste of paper!

A lot of these disreputable companies will give out a "hypnotherapy certificate" to anyone attending their course, regardless of whether said person can actually demonstrate their knowledge of the subject or not (just like in the last section about online hypnotherapy training), so certificates don't always = knowledge!

The main things that you should be aiming to get from your hypnotherapy course are knowledge, experience and confidence (confidence that you have enough knowledge and experience to actually begin using hypnotherapy once the course is over).

One of the most sought after, legitimate hypnotherapy certificates, issued by the NGH

Having a nice, big certificate at the end of the course is an added bonus, but it shouldn't be your goal. And if you really, really do want a certificate, please ensure that it is actually worth having...

Ensure that your qualification is REAL...

You can complete a course, get a certificate and you might even get (or be eligible for) a "membership" to some hypnotherapy organisation... Now, that all sounds great on the face of it, but you must be aware that some trainers will make all of this stuff up! The certificate, the qualification and even the associated organisation! No, unfortunately that's not a joke, I've come across some hypnotherapy trainers who've made their own fake "regulating organisations"...but sadly it's completely legal.

You should ask the trainer whether their qualification meets the requirements of any hypnotherapy regulators or training bodies, and if it doesn't, find a new hypnotherapy trainer.

If they give you the name of some company/body, check it out online to see if it's a respected, long-standing organisation. If you're not sure, you can always ask around on forums whether it's reputable.

There are a select few highly ranking national and international organisations that top quality hypnotherapy training companies will be linked to, and you will usually see the logos on your trainers websites. As a rule, these organisations require their trainers to meet the hypnotherapy core curriculum (as previously mentioned) or their own mandatory curriculum. Here are the top 3:

The NGH are one of the oldest hypnotherapy bodies in the world, with members across the UK, USA, and in more than 25 countries. The NGH has trainers all over the world, and continues to offer some of the most comprehensive hypnotherapy training available.

The GHSC are comprised of representatives from both professional hypnotherapy organisations & training schools. Their job is to oversee the criteria for the accreditation of hypnotherapy training courses and the ongoing requirements for registration of practitioners within the General Hypnotherapy Register.

The BIH was established in 1984. It's primary aim is to offer information for the public, who are searching for help with health and well-being issues and looking for a suitable practitioner to help them. And also to run and monitor a register of hypnotherapy practitioners, who are qualified, insured, competent and ethical.

There are other organisations, but these are 3 of the most prominent and well respected in the UK, and when you study with a hypnotherapy training company, I would personally advise you to seek out one that is registered with at least one of these organisations, for your own peace of mind.

Now it's time to act...

Hopefully this page has been of some help to you, and if you have any questions please don't hesitate to get in touch with me personally.

Whether you train with me at The Hypnotherapy Training Company or somewhere completely different, what's important is that you are trained well, and that you leave the course knowing what you're doing. The more well-trained hypnotherapists there are, the better the public opinion of hypnotherapy will become! Badly trained hypnotherapists would have the opposite effect, and we definitely don't want that.

Best of luck on your journey towards becoming a qualified hypnotherapist, be shrewd in your decisions, make sure you know the facts, and know that you're getting the best training before you book, because let's face it...you deserve it!

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